Horror High: How Calgary became a hotspot for low-budget horror films

Mike Peterson plans to hold a uniquely Albertan celebration in London to bring attention to Calgary films.

The Calgary filmmaker landed in England on Wednesday evening to participate in FrightFest, an annual U.K. film festival that screens horror movies from around the world. Four locally shot films will be shown at the festival this year, including two that Peterson produced.

So he thought of a suitably horrifying way to celebrate the intersection of Alberta and horror: A prairie oyster eating contest.

Prairie oyster is the more palatable term for bull testicle, a delicacy that has somehow become associated with Wild Rose Country over the years.

Granted, at the time of this interview, Peterson was still uncertain about how he would procure the prairie oysters while in the U.K. But he was optimistic he would find a local source while at FrightFest, a festival not known for attracting patrons with faint hearts or weak stomachs.

From the film Harpoon. Courtesy, Calgary Underground Film Festival.Calgary

“Otherwise, I’m going to be carrying a cooler full of testicles through customs,” he jokes. “I’d rather not do that.”

As of press time, there had been no word from the various Calgarians attending the festival about whether the competition went on as planned. What is clear is that Calgary has a healthy contingent of filmmakers at the world-renowned genre festival, providing ample evidence that the city has become a hotspot for filmmakers who specialize in smart, low-budget horror.

In fact, having four homegrown movies at an international festival at the same time is likely unprecedented and something Peterson thinks is worth highlighting at home and abroad.

Peterson’s Calgary-based production company 775 Media Corp, which he runs with actor/producer Julian Black Antelope and entrepreneur Laurie Venning, is one of the reasons the city has become such fertile ground for horror films. Since 2017, the company has cranked out five feature films that all fit loosely into the horror genre. That includes Rob Grant’s 2019 comedy-horror Harpoon and Braden Croft’s 2019 horror-thriller True Fiction, both of which are screening at Frightfest. Calgary filmmaker Kurtis David Harder’s thriller Spiral will also be featured at the London festival, as will local director Cameron Macgowan’s feature debut, Red Letter Day.

All four represent different shades of horror and, for the most part, were filmed in Calgary using local crews. Harpoon, which screened earlier this year at the Calgary Underground Film Festival, is described as Seinfeld meets Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water. It tells a darkly funny and claustrophobic tale of three friends stranded at sea who become more and more murderous as their desperation grows. True Fiction is a thriller about a young woman drawn into a horrifying psychological cat-and-mouse game when she becomes the assistant of a renowned horror writer. Spiral has been compared to Jordan Peele’s Get Out for mixing horror and social commentary with a tale about same-sex parents who discover their seemingly perfect suburban neighbourhood isn’t what it seems. Red Letter Day, which also screened at the Calgary Underground Film Festival, is a dark satire about the carnage that erupts in the ‘burbs after mysterious letters begin appearing that instruct residents to murder their neighbours.

So why is Calgary becoming Canada’s capital for low-budget horror? Well, the low-budget part is key. Thanks to the city’s first-rate crews, horror films shot for relatively little money don’t look like they’ve been shot for relatively little money. That means these four films won’t look out of place when compared to FrightFest’s heavy hitters this year, which include the Sam Raimi-produced Crawl and Guillermo del Toro-produced Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark.

“I would argue that if you took any of (775 Media Corp’s) five movies and looked at the budget and then took any five similar type of films from anywhere else in Canada, I think you would see the production values that we are able to get with our crews and creative teams are higher than anywhere else,” says Peterson. “No one is watching our movies and saying ‘Oh, it’s pretty good for a (low-budget) movie.’”

Horror films are also less reliant on star power than other genres, another factor that greatly cuts back on costs. Before he set out on his own to make Red Letter Day, Macgowan was part of the Calgary-based film collective, North Country Cinema, which specializes in low-budget ensemble dramas. Macgowan was among the producers of Kyle Thomas’ The Valley Below, a well-acted and well-written drama that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014.

“What I really discovered when trying to sell that film was that if you are going to be making a drama or a comedy or an action film, you really need a recognizable face for international sales,” says Macgowan, whose Red Letter Day has screened in 11 festivals including the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival and the Sydney Underground Film Festival. “That’s not attainable on a small budget. The beauty of horror movies is that people aren’t coming for the actors or for famous folks. They are coming for the high concepts. As long as you can deliver on the thrills and a cool, unique concept to get their asses in seats you pretty much have a loyal audience.”

Macgowan also credits the 16-year-old Calgary Underground Film Festival and its co-founder Brenda Lieberman for helping develop a local filmmaking community with an appreciation for the horror genre.

“Before CUFF existed, there was really no footprint of horror movies in this city,” says Macgowan, who also programs for CUFF. “It was really hard to see the cool up-and-coming stuff. Especially before the internet, you’d have no idea that some of these movies existed unless you took a risk at the video store. I think Brenda Lieberman has quite a bit to do with the appetite for horror films in the past little while. A lot of the filmmakers that are showing their horror features at FrightFest started by making short films in this city. It’s been a 10-year process for a lot of us to get to this point. Without the support of cool genre festivals in Calgary and surrounding areas, I don’t think people would be making these types of films.”

While Lieberman isn’t prepared to take credit for the local horror-movie boom, she does say that the festival has been keen to showcase local talent over the years. Beyond that, the bumper crop of genre films seems to be the product of a perfect storm of variables: writers and directors with high-concept ideas that can be realized with a low-budget; first-rate crews willing to work on low-budget features; and filmmakers who want to stay in Calgary rather than leave for Toronto or Vancouver.

The local filmmakers passion and growing skills are nicely aligning with a general increase in popularity of the genre, she says.

“This is what they are genuinely interested in, they are passionate about it,” Lieberman says. “Right now, with the popularity of genre films and this being a natural passion of the demographic of people making them in Calgary, it’s putting them on a level playing field internationally.”

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